Pepsi Is Ditching One Fake Sweetener, But What About The Rest?

Mother Jones

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Alexei Vella

Junk-food giant PepsiCo is preparing to make the biggest change to its Diet Pepsi brand in three decades, Bloomberg News reports: it’s nixing the controversial low-calorie sweetener aspartame. In its place, Diet Pepsi will get its sweet jolt from a mix of sucralose and acesulfame potassium. The apparent reason for the shake-up: Diet Pepsi sales plunged 5.2 percent last year, Bloomberg noted. Rival Diet Coke fared even worse, enduring 6.6 percent drop in sales (though Coke is clinging fast to aspartame). What gives?

Even with the recent consumer turn away from these once-formidable products, the lure of sweet-but-virtuous soda is still going strong—and goes back decades. Recently, I came across one from a 1966 glossy magazine featuring a close-up shot of a supple-lipped woman filling a glass with Tab, Coca-Cola’s original diet soda. “One crazy calorie in every six ounces,” the copy purrs, with a Don Draper-ish flourish: “Like everything now, a little crazy, but wow.”

Today, diet drinks make up 27.5 percent of the $76.3 billion US soft-drink market, according to Beverage Digest. And artificial sweeteners don’t just work their magic on sodas. They also appear in stuff like Minute Maid Light Orange Juice, Quaker “25% less sugar” granola bars, and Thomas’ 100% Whole Wheat English Muffins. A 2012 study by Emory University researchers found that nearly a quarter of adults and 12.5 percent of children regularly consumed artificially sweetened beverages. Globally, the market for low-calorie foods and drinks will hit $10.4 billion by 2019, up from today’s $7.4 billion, predicts the firm Transparency Market Research. Prominent medical groups approve: The American Diabetes Association, for example, recommends diet soda as an alternative to the real stuff.